


We Could Be Wonderful Together

by Sachete



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Domestic, First Time, Frottage, Grief/Mourning, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Oral Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Second Kiss, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-22 22:48:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6096460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sachete/pseuds/Sachete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There comes a point in every man's life when he must ponder the merits of marrying his best bro and roommate of ten years. Or maybe that's just you. Yeah, actually, it's probably just you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. We could be wonderful together

“Dave, you left your fucking phone on the kitchen table and it’s been going off nonstop since two-thirty.”

I start out of sleep and see with bleary eyes that Karkat’s in my bedroom’s doorway with smears of light from the kitchen pouring around him. He chucks my phone at me, and I’m lucky I’m just awake enough to swat it out of its collision course with my head and onto the floor. Concussion averted. “ _Please_ tell whoever is texting you at this unholy hour to fuck off until tomorrow afternoon so I can go back to sleep and enjoy my weekend without further interruption.”

I dive for my phone just as it chimes again, and after too much blinking and too many tries to swipe to unlock, I can barely make out Rose’s name at the top of the message app with like twenty new messages. What the hell.

“It’s Rose,” I say, looking at Karkat. His expression softens from frustration to worry.

“Your sister?”

“No, my booty call.”

“What’s she doing texting you so late?”

“Damned if I know.” Fuck, what if it’s an emergency? What if she got drunk tonight after five years of sobriety? I catch Karkat sneaking closer as I scroll to the top of the new messages.

“What’s going on?”

“Christ, Karkat, would you please firmly grasp your tits with both hands and apply a soothing motion until they are sufficiently calm? I don’t know. I just woke up. I’m trying to read.”

My eyes glaze over the texts, seeing but not quite understanding until a few minutes have passed and I can comprehend that there is no emergency. A lot of unguarded excitement, but no emergency. I sigh and start to type a response, sleepy fingers not quite hitting all the right buttons and making a lot of typos that autocorrect misinterprets into my most common Freudian slips, and it takes twice as long to go back and fix them before I can finally send anything.

“Well?”

My phone chimes again almost as soon as I put it down. “Rose proposed to Kanaya. We’re invited to the wedding.” She’s sent some smartass text about being prompt with my response and no matter how happy I am for her I am absolutely not in the mood.

“We?”

“We, as in plural of I, as in you and me, bro.”

“Oh.”

“You sound surprised.”

Karkat rubs his arm and shrugs. “I dunno. It’s just, she’s your sister and I’m just your roommate.”

“Yeah, my roommate and best bro of like ten years now. We’re practically married.”

“We are not.”

“We kind of are. We’re a little bit married.”

He screws up his face and my phone chimes a few more times. I punch his arm.

“Relax. Seriously man, you can come to my sister’s wedding. She’s the one who invited you. You leveled up.”

“All right.”

“Do you want me to tell her you said congratulations?” I ask, checking the new messages. “Because you haven’t actually said that yet. I’ll tell her to slow her roll in the same text if you really wanna go back to sleep.”

“Just tell her I said congratulations and she better not let you near any of the wedding plans,” he says with a hand in his hair, almost turning to go back to his room before thinking better of it and reaching for my phone. “Actually, gimme that. I’m telling her that personally so you don’t fuck it up.”

I snicker and give him the phone and he sprawls out on my bed and fumbles worse than me while trying to talk to Rose because he has an Android and I have an iPhone and there are just enough differences in the keyboard layouts to make typing difficult. I let him chat with her for a while before getting too fucking tired and trying to take my phone back.

“All right, that’s enough of that. You’re not gonna plot their whole wedding on my phone plan.”

His eyes are glued to the screen, though. “Lilac and green, Dave. It’ll be in the spring. We need to get matching ties, and the bridesmaid dresses need to be flowy; no tulle.”

“Oh my god, that is the gayest thing you have said all day.”

“It’s only three in the morning. There’s still time.”

I have to wrest the phone from his hands and send Rose a hasty goodbye. I put it on the side table. Karkat’s still in my bed. Not that that’s weird or anything. Ten years of living with the guy kind of blurs the boundaries of personal space and what was originally mine and his. Dude can pass out in my bed whenever. We’re so damn comfortable with each other that we could probably downgrade to a one-bedroom apartment and just share, I honestly would not mind, but it’s been nice being settled. This place is home.

“I wonder what it’s like to be married,” I mumble, and Karkat grunts to let me know he’s awake and listening. “I can’t really visualize it,” I continue. “Like, we always said we’d split at some point and find nice girls and start families and all that and just be good friends, godfathers to our kids or something, but really it’s just… we’re almost thirty, Karkat.”

“Dear fucking god, don’t remind me.”

“And I mean I’m good with this. I like this, living with you and all, and it’s been great, but am I missing out on something? Should I be going clubbing? Fuck, I’m too old for that shit. I have a job. I have a good job.”

“Hm.”

I’d been looking at the ceiling, but now I roll over to stare at Karkat while I monologue. “Maybe the whole dating scene is kinda behind me. Maybe I’ll just never meet that special someone, and like, the Dave from high school and college woulda been down with that as long as he was getting laid every night, but I haven’t gotten laid in… fuck, I forget. Dear god, Karkat, I forget the last time I had sex with someone.”

“Not like you would be getting a lot of sex if you got married,” Karkat comments. “How do you think Cosmo stays in print? Why do you think _Fifty Shades of Grey_ exists in the first place?”

“Point taken.”

He’s quiet for a second. “The way I see it,” he starts slowly, “is that we’re already kinda living it.”

“Living what?”

He shifts, propping himself up on his elbows. “The married life. You said it yourself. We’re kind of married.”

“I didn’t mean it nothin’ like that. I just meant, like…” What did I mean it as? “When people invite you somewhere, they figure I’m gonna be your plus-one and just go ahead and invite me, too, and visa versa. It’s never like, ‘Hey Dave, you wanna come to the office Christmas party?’ but like, 'Hey Dave, you and Karkat wanna come to the office Christmas party?’ We’re like, an inseparable entity. I mean, we live together and pay the bills together and share everything and I can’t imagine any future without that.” Holy fuck, what was that? What are you saying, Dave? What are these words coming out of your mouth right now? “Might as well just go to the courthouse and do the paperwork and open some joint accounts, file our taxes together, stuff like that if we’re gonna keep doing this.” Fuck fuck fuck what am I _saying?_

“Doing what?” Karkat asks. “What is this to you?”

“I don’t know!” How is he staying so calm? I can’t see his face too great in the dark, but my eyes are adjusted just enough to see the outline of that conciliatory “It’s okay, I’m here to listen to you” look, and goddamn, I love and hate that look. I love and hate how he pulls it, his eyebrows drawing just enough to show concern but not worry, his mouth easing into a gentle smile, and fuck, he’s just amazing.

“Dave.”

“Hm.”

“Are you proposing to me?”

“Hell no. I’m just saying… weighing our options… it’s not the shittiest idea.”

We’re quiet again, and all of a sudden having Karkat in my bed isn’t comfortable anymore. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s too much. It’s drowning me in a sea of unexplored feelings for my goddamn roommate, and _how have I never thought of this before?_

“Can we talk about this in the morning?” I ask under my breath. “When my head’s clear. I can’t think. I’m fucking spiraling right now, Kar.”

“If you’re worried about me saying no, don’t,” he says, and I can’t fucking breathe.

“Don’t do this to me, Kar.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m just saying.”

“Don’t say anything.”

“We could if you wanted to.”

I wish he wouldn’t look at me like that. Like he would genuinely be okay with marrying me. Like he wants to spend the rest of his life with me. Like he’s been thinking about this and waiting for it to come up in conversation for years, and now this is his chance to get it all out there. I can’t stand to look at him, but I can’t look away, either.

“It could be small,” he says too casually, wistfully. “Just a courthouse thing like you mentioned. Some close family and friends. Kan and Rose could witness.”

“We wouldn’t be in love.” Even as I say it, my eyes burn and my stomach lurches because Karkat’s face falls.

“Plenty of people get married without being in love,” he says, but then seems to want to take it back. “Is that important to you? To marry someone for love?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.”

We don’t speak for a while. I pick up my phone from the side table and browse the messages Karkat sent to Rose. He seemed so excited. She seemed excited, too, in her own way.

“Do you think you could love me, Dave?”

I put the phone down. I feel like I’m going to cry because the answer is yes, yes, a hundred thousand percent yes, I can see us being married. I can see us with rings and kisses and private smiles, and maybe it wouldn’t be this overwhelming passionate love that you always read about in romance novels but something different. Something comfortable and quiet and lighthearted like it’s always been between us. I could fall in love with Karkat if I let myself.

I can’t say it, though. I parrot his question back at him: “Could you love me?”

He has to hear my heartbeat in the silence that follows. He has to hear the nervousness in my pulse, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-da-bum, stuttering and quickening to heart attack rhythms. Surely he hears it, and he knows what to say because he always knows what to say when we’re talking seriously. I close my eyes. I can’t look at him when he says it.

“I think I already do.”

“Fuck, Karkat.”

“I love you, Dave.”

“Cut it out.”

“I love you and I want you to marry me, please, Dave.”

“I’m gonna be sick. You’re gonna make me sick.”

“I want you to love me,” he says anyway, and he’s killing me, making me feel things I didn’t know were possible to feel. “It doesn’t have to be right this second. It could be tomorrow. It could be twenty years from now. I just want to marry you and we can live like we always have, in this apartment or wherever you want to go. I want to spend… I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and if you didn’t love me, I might be able to live with that. But I think if you loved me, things would be easier.”

“ _Fuck._ ”

I get this crazy impulse to open my eyes and reach across the gap between us and hold his face in my hands and kiss him, and wouldn’t it be weird and horrible and _wonderful_ , having his lips under mine, having them part for me while I pour out all of the love I can muster, let show ten years of repressed feelings and actions in one display of affection, and it wouldn’t all fit in one kiss, no, I’d have to pull back and tell him yes, I’ll marry you, and I could love you, I think, and I’d go back to kiss him again and again and _again_ until we’re breathless and flushed and crying, yeah we’d probably be crying, but it’d be great. It’d be beautiful.

I don’t act on that impulse. I let the fantasy play out in my mind before swallowing a lump in my throat. I hold his hand instead, twine my fingers with his, and this could work, I think. We could have this together.

“Will you marry me, Dave Strider?”

I open my eyes at last to look at him, and there’s so much love there, so much on the line for him. This is important to him. “What the fuck are we doing? This is insane. This is—Am I gonna regret this?”

He makes a noise like a laugh and a cough and a sob all at once. “Is that a yes?”

“Am I gonna regret this?”

“No! Is that a yes?”

“It might be.”

“Dave!”

I smile, too giddy for my own good. “It’s a yes.”

The hope that blooms on his face, in his eyes, is enough, and I hold his hand tighter, pull him closer, and even though we’re vibrating with excitement, we can’t stay awake forever, and I don’t mind him passing out in my bed. He can do that anytime.


	2. We're Wonderful Together

“Come to bed, babe.”

“Don’t use infantile terms with me, Strider.”

“Strider- _Vantas._ ”

“Ugh.”

“Regretting it already?”

“In your dreams, asswipe.”

He’s taking the time to remove his tux whereas I flop on the bed as soon as I enter my— _our_ —room, dress shoes and all. I watch him strip down to his underwear and grab a set of pajamas.

“I feel all gross. I’m taking a shower.”

“Is that an invitation, sweetheart?”

He flips me off as he goes to the bathroom and I’m glad things haven’t changed too much. I scratch an itch on the back of my neck where the tag on my dress shirt has been scraping the skin all day and decide it’s time to get out of this monkey suit no matter how smoking I look in it. The shower sputters to a start on the other side of the wall while I undress and I ponder the merits of taking off my underwear, too, and sprawling out on the bed in that “draw me like one of your French girls” pose. I think better of it and keep my boxers on.

Karkat sings in the shower most days. It’s not bad to listen to. Tonight he hums something I don’t recognize, then trails off to take the rest of his shower in silence. I lay on the bed again on top of the covers and wait for the water to shut off and for him to come back. I wonder how long it’ll take for me to get used to the weight on my ring finger. When Karkat enters the room, dressed and warm and hair standing all over, he catches me admiring the gold band but doesn’t comment on it. I flash a grin at him.

“Squeaky clean, cupcake?”

“We’re gonna hafta work on your nicknames.”

“How about angel? Kitty? Darlin’?”

“I could live with darling, maybe.”

I pat his side of the bed and he comes over. We started sleeping in the same bed maybe a month before the wedding. He told me it wasn’t necessary, that we could still sleep in separate rooms like we always have, but I insisted. I like holding him. Now we have a guest room that stays tidy for all the people who don’t spend the night.

The bed dips under his weight when he leans in to kiss me for the second time in my life. I don’t know how to move with him yet and don’t dare open my mouth. He’s patient with me when he pulls away and we have our third kiss, and our fourth, and I think it would be crazy and hilarious to keep count so I could say “achievement unlocked” when we hit numbers like ten and a hundred and a thousand.

By the sixth I’ve learned how to breathe with him. At twenty I wonder if I should be counting the ones on my cheeks, my forehead, the pulse point on my neck, and I lose track altogether when he licks at my lips in a silent request for more. I don’t know how much more I can give right now, but I try.

Karkat rearranges our bodies, guiding me backwards so he hovers over me in a dominant position I didn’t think I’d be too crazy about but hey, first time for everything, and my stomach curls and relaxes in anticipation I wasn’t expecting, either. It’s a little scary. Everything is a little scary, from the way his kisses get more aggressive, to the way he grips my hair with one hand and strokes patterns into my torso with the other, to the way my hands seem to move of their own accord until they’re under his shirt and pressing down on the small of his back so our hips touch, and god, how long has he been hard? How long have I?

He jerks away in surprise, and we get a chance to catch our breath. His eyes are crazy, searching, his face on fire, and I know I’m the same. I’m lost and blind and fumbling for something familiar to grasp at, and so is he. Or at least, I think he is. Who knows what Karkat’s been researching in his spare time, but I’m completely unprepared and feel like a goddamn virgin again.

Karkat rolls off of me to settle on his side of the bed, waiting for our breathing to return to normal before speaking.

“How, um.” His voice cracks, and he clears his throat. “How far did you want to go? Tonight, I mean.”

“Uh.” I swallow some spit that’s probably a mixture of his and mine and okay that’s weird to think about. “I dunno. I didn’t really think we would—”

“And we don’t have to,” he interrupts.

“Isn’t it kind of traditional to, though?”

He snorts. “You say that like any of this has been traditional.”

“I guess. Um. Did… Did _you_ wanna…?”

“Maybe. Kinda. Yeah, actually.”

I try to swallow again, but there’s nothing left. “I don’t know much about any of that stuff. Not with guys.”

“Me neither. Not first-hand.”

We’re quiet for a bit, and my boner isn’t going down but I don’t wanna do anything about it right now. Would that be weird? I laugh despite myself. “I feel like I’m in high school again, but twenty times gayer and a little bit hornier.”

“I don't think anyone is as horny as they are in high school.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He grins and shoves at me, and I catch his hand to hold against my chest. I’m glad we can still joke around.

“Hey.”

“Hm.”

I squeeze his hand. “I wanna do this with you. I don’t know how far we can go, but I wanna at least try.”

He squeezes back. “That’s all I’ll ever ask.”

I initiate the kiss this time. He’s careful at first but growls when I hold his hips and pull him close. He claws at my back and grinds against me, and he’s making delicious sounds, moans and sighs, gasps and grunts, or maybe they’re mine. I can’t really tell. Either way, I kiss him until I can’t breathe.

“You’re sure?” he asks, and I nod and help him pull his shirt up and over his head. Relax, Strider (Strider- _Vantas_ ). You’ve seen him naked before. On accident, maybe, but you’ve seen it. He squirms out of his pants. Don’t freak out, don’t freak out. Relax. Enjoy this.

My confidence comes in waves, though, and this surge starts to ebb, hands which had been ready to rip the clothes from his body now pausing at the last little article. If I pay close enough attention, I can almost feel the heat coming off of him. You can do this, you can do this—

Karkat takes his boxers off himself. I’m too relieved to be disappointed. My hands are shaking, so he helps with mine, too, and then we’re both naked and confused, which seems like a three-Michelin star recipe for destruction and disaster.

“I regret never experimenting back at Bible camp now.”

“You went to Bible camp?”

“Nah.”

He takes his position back over me and I’m more okay with it this time, as long as he keeps doing—yes, _that, yes—_ with his hips, as long as he keeps touching and kissing and murmuring soft reassurances and I love yous that make me want to cry because I can’t muster the courage to say the same. It’s too much too fast but I don’t want it to stop, couldn’t stop it if I tried because I’m pushing up to meet him with every movement, pulling his hair to force his mouth closer, and I have no clue what I’m doing but I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna last much longer if he keeps—fuck fuck _fuck._

“Kar, _fuck_.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just, holy _shit_.”

“You sure?”

“How the hell are you so good at this?”

“Porn, I guess.”

“Gay porn?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“You watch gay porn?”

“You don’t?”

The tempo slows while we’re talking and I take advantage and flip him over, straddle his hips, jerk our cocks together, and yeah, this feels good, too. I like watching his face transform from dominant and assured into something submissive and unraveling.

“ _Dave—_ ”

“I got this. I got you, Kar.”

I’ve got this. I can do this. My hips roll and snap with his, the knot in my gut tightening, loosening, tightening, teetering towards an edge we’ll plummet over together. This is good. This is… This is better than good.

He arches up to smear an uncoordinated kiss on my neck that somehow makes it to my mouth, lingers there and steals my breath even as he comes in my hand, _oh, oh, oh,_ and I don’t last much longer—not with him looking like that, not with him sounding like that, not with my name lifting from his lips like a prayer, and I collapse on top of him, and I hate to reiterate for about the millionth time, but I can’t breathe.

When his breathing goes back to normal, he huffs and tries to push me off.

“What? Too heavy?”

“Too _hot,_ goddamn. And you’re all sticky.”

“ _We’re_ all sticky, darlin’.”

He lets me drape an arm over him while he reaches to grab some tissues from the side table, though, so I guess it’s not that hot. He wipes up as much as he can in silence. His ring catches some ambient light.

“Hey Kar.”

“Hm.” He’s tossing the used tissues at the waste basket in the corner and only misses half of the shots. When he finishes, he looks at me to continue, but I’m not sure if I can. He knows exactly what I want to say but he’s completely resigned to my resolution not to say it. Not yet. The words freeze up in my throat. I look down.

“Nevermind.”

We cover up in the sheets even though it’s too damn hot. He cards his fingers through my hair; he covers my face in kisses. I smooth my hand up and down his back, feeling the ridges of his spine. Splay my fingers across his neck, take his pulse.

“It’s okay, Dave.”

“It’s not okay.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

Not I love you, too. Just I know. He smiles, though.

We fall asleep tangled together, too much unsaid.


	3. We don't have everything; we don't have anything

It’s about a month before anyone invites us out again. I get the feeling that my friends and coworkers have split themselves into two groups—not between who is accepting of me and Karkat and who isn’t, because everyone is for the most part very accepting. It’s more of a divide between who was surprised at the ring on my finger and who saw it coming a million miles away.

Rose and Kanaya belong to the latter group, I think, and that might be why they’re the first to invite us to dinner as a married couple.

Me and Karkat show up at their house (They have a _house_ and a _garden_ and a _mortgage_ and _everything._ Goddamn, I think, will we ever have that?) a few minutes before seven. Their garden, which I’m guessing Kanaya is responsible for, is in full bloom, save for a vine with large, heart-shaped leaves that climbs and forms to an iron trellis that arches above the door. It must not bloom, I think.

Kanaya’s the one to greet us, and I tear my attention away from the unblooming vine and onto her smiling face and also onto Karkat’s hand in mine which suddenly feels like a white-hot coal, like the kind I accidentally picked up at a school field day where one of the PTA dads was grilling hot dogs and burgers and wasn’t paying attention to the little kid investigating the coals that had fallen through the grate and were making a little charred spot in the grass. I tear my hand away, too, so I can shake her hand, and Karkat does the same, and then I don’t hold his hand again in front of her.

“I’m glad the two of you could make it,” she says, ushering us inside, and I’ve visited their house a lot but never as a married man and now I’m taken by surprise how… how grown-up it looks. Like I’m seeing it for the first time. I keep forgetting how fucking _loaded_ my sister is being a certified therapist and all. They decorate in sensibilities I can’t name because I’m not some sorta interior designer, goddammit, but it’s all warm colors and intelligent (can a room be intelligent?), like you might expect from an old college professor’s office. All dark wood desks and tables and bookcases full of smart books on psychology and botany and sewing, I’m sure. Kanaya has us sit on the leather couch. The smell of coffee and cat fills every cranny. (Speaking of, the black beastie Jasper materializes and sidles up to Karkat while flicking its tail in my face.) “Take a seat—Rose is just putting the chicken in.”

I notice Rose has the real human brain in a jar I gave her for her birthday on display on the mantle, and I get a little swell of pride that she likes it enough to show off next to pictures of their wedding. ( _We_ didn’t have many pictures taken at our wedding, and we certainly didn’t frame them. Should we have? Should our apartment look more adult-like?)

Kanaya settles in a wingback chair with a basket of gardening and sewing magazines nearby. Another chair sits next to that one, and that one must be Rose’s by the stray knitting needles poking through the cushion.

“Your garden’s doing well,” Karkat says for something to say as he strokes Jasper head-to-tail until he lays in his lap and doesn’t flick my face any more. “Are the moonflowers still in bloom?”

“Oh, yes, you should see them tonight. They’re a fragrant variety.”

“Remind me how you keep the foliage so thick?” Why is he asking that, I wonder, when we don’t have a garden, when our apartment has no room or light really for plants?

“Just proper and frequent pruning. I have an article around here somewhere…”

“I’m gone for five seconds to put a bird in the oven and the conversation has already turned to plants." Rose's voice comes from the kitchen doorway, and the three of us turn to look at her. Goddammit, she looks too grown up with her smoky eyeshadow and clean lines of understated red lipstick. She rolls her eyes. "This will be a short night.”

“Hey sis, good to see you, too.”

She wipes her hands on her skirt and smiles. “Dave, Karkat, I’m glad you could make it. How’s the happy couple?”

“Happy,” Karkat says.

“A couple,” I supply.

“You haven’t been around in a while,” she says, sitting in the chair with the knitting needles next to Kanaya, and I think they look a bit like the couple from Up. (Do _we_ look like the couple from Up? Could we?)

“And whose fault is that?” Karkat snarks. “It’s like everyone’s been avoiding us. You’re the first to invite us anywhere.”

Kanaya straightens in her chair. “We wanted to give you time to settle… get used to married life.”

“It’s pretty much the same as regular life. It’s just…”

“More on paper.”

“Yeah, what he said.”

Kan and Rose kinda look at each other and do this girly tittering thing, and I swear I’m back in high school or something.

“What?” Karkat and I say at the same time. Whatever Rose was about to say is cut short by a fit of giggles.

“You finish each other’s sentences,” Kanaya says for her. I see Karkat blush out of the corner of my eye. “You did it before, and we didn’t brush it off, per se, but now…”

“It’s so _obvious_.” Rose says when she’s back in control of her voice. “You _acted_ married before you _got_ married.”

“Really, it was more a matter of when it would happen rather than if.”

“Okay, thanks, I get it,” Karkat says, and the hand that wasn’t stroking Jasper goes up to scrub the blush away from his face, his ears, and hey, I’m embarrassed, too, but it’s cute seeing it on him. I’m tempted to reach out and grab his hand and tell him to relax, and I think I would have back at home, but I can’t in front of them, and I’m not sure why.

“How are things with you guys, though?” I ask to divert the subject.

“Oh! Rose, tell them about that lovely letter from the head of the psychology department at the university,” Kanaya says. Rose preens a bit.

“Yes, well, some grad students needed to interview someone in the field, and I was happy to oblige. It's always nice to help in academics despite leaving much of that behind lately. But you should really hear what Kanaya did recently…”

This goes on for half an hour, or however long it takes a chicken to roast, and I start to wonder, has conversation always been this boring? This one-sided? Listening to their achievements, one after another after another—it gets boring. I have nothing to contribute. What have we done? What have we accomplished? What do we have to show from this besides a pair of rings and more complicated taxes come May?

Dinner is great because Rose is a great cook, and we _keep talking_ about all of this stuff that I care about because it’s happening to my sister and her wife, but also I don’t care about it at all because I feel like I'm… I don’t know what I feel like. I feel like the centerpiece is too fucking lovely and grown-up for the girl who used to carefully pin butterfly wings to foam board, who used to pull my hair when she didn’t get her way, who used to pine after _boys_ until one day she stopped. I play with Karkat’s feet under the table and revel in my childishness.

I help Rose clear the table while Kanaya takes Karkat outside to see the moonflowers, whatever those are. (Does Karkat like plants? Should we get a windowbox or something? An orchid or some shit?) Of course they have a grandfather clock, and it chimes nine. Rose washes. I dry, and their towels are these shitty thin things with cute patterns printed on them that smear the water around on the dishes instead of actually drying anything. It makes everything take longer than it should.

“I made cookies earlier today if you’d like some. I’ll pour you a cup of coffee.”

I never got that, either, the whole drinking coffee at dark-thirty thing. I take some, though, and the cookies, too. All of their mugs match. We go back to the living room.

“Are you all right, Dave? You’ve been quiet all evening.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She hums and sips her coffee with the non-alcoholic Irish cream. “Are you sure? You and Karkat are okay?”

“Yeah, it’s great. We’re great.”

“All right, then.”

And it’s that shit right there, where a year ago she would have pushed me and analyzed everything I had to say and diagnose me with some brain disease or something, and instead we’re listening to Kanaya just outside explaining the proper care for begonias and impatiens, and I think, Karkat doesn’t like plants. He’s being just as polite as I am, listening to them go on and on about their interests because we have nothing interesting to say ourselves. Here are two go-getters who got everything and each other. And what do we have? What do _I_ have? I don’t have everything. I don’t have anything. I have an apartment and Ikea furniture and mismatched mugs and ugly towels that actually work.

And then Karkat and Kanaya come back in, and almost reflexively I think, I do have everything, but then I take it back because that’s sappy as fuck. But I do. I have him. And he’s been my everything for over ten years, and he’ll keep being my everything for a million more.

He declines the coffee and cookies Rose offers. “Actually, I think it’s about time we headed home. Dave has an early shift tomorrow.”

I look at him. Do I? And then I realize he knows that, and I nod along. “Yeah, I do. Sorry if you expected us to stay longer.”

“Oh, no, it’s no problem,” Rose says. I hand my untouched coffee to her. “We understand, don’t we, Kanaya?” She rests her hand on her partner’s hip. They look good together.

“Yes, go home and get some rest so you will be chipper for work tomorrow.”

We say our goodbyes, and Karkat takes me by the hand to lead me out the door, and his palm isn’t a hot coal anymore, but the ice and gauze and neosporin the school nurse used after I started screaming and crying. When the door closes behind us, I have a chance to see the vine with the large, heart-shaped leaves, and I see it does bloom in round white flowers like morning glories the size of my outstretched palm. And then we’re in the car and Karkat is driving, and I cover his hand with mine on the gearshift and we don’t talk, because we’ve been talking all evening and we don’t have to say much. Right now I just want to go home and kiss him and go to sleep. I tell him that. He mumbles his agreement, a quiet  _fuck yeah_.

I feel myself fall in love a little more. I feel myself getting closer to the day I’ll be able to tell him that, tell him I have everything.


	4. This is it

It’s been six months. Now I wake up next to him with pain and warmth in my chest, which I’ve started calling irrational, ridiculous love. I wake up before him and hold his hand against my chest and listen to him breathe. These days it’s still dark by the time I wake up, and I get to watch the sun slowly start to spill through the curtains, watch it overtake the darkness and bloom behind his hair. And when the light wanders across his closed eyes he takes a fast, deep breath through his nose, and I know he’s awake, and I can press my lips to his and feel his mouth turn up into a small smile.

“Good morning.”

And then the pain and warmth turns into crushing and burning, and I’ve started calling that the grounded, reasonable fear.

I still haven’t told him.

He makes the coffee. He makes good coffee, this wonderful dark sludge with a taste that sticks to your throat even after you’ve brushed your teeth twice (not that I brush my teeth twice in a row, just that I think it would stick even if I did do that), and he sprinkles cinnamon and sometimes cloves or nutmeg in the grounds before he brews it, and it reminds me that holidays are coming up.

“What’re we doing for Thanksgiving? Christmas?” I ask. He rolls his eyes.

“Christ, it’s not even November yet. Why are you asking that?”

“Well I figure we can’t just go our separate ways this year, can we?”

“Hm.”

“What’re you getting me?” I tease, poking his shoulder. “Oh, a new necklace? How thoughtful. I do declare, hubby, these rubies match the earrings you got me for my birthday. Open yours. It’s a Santa-patterned tie and a bottle of cologne.”

He snorts into his coffee and almost spills. “Wow, okay, don’t actually get me that.”

“I should just buy out Mr. Egbert’s wardrobe and wrap it up. You’re getting me the necklace, though, right?”

“Sure.”

I turn the TV on to Fox and mute it, and we ad-lib shitty punk-rock lyrics from our high school days into the reporters’ mouths.

“Really, though. What are we doing for Christmas?” I ask after making one of the blond women say _Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!_  “You’ve always gone out to visit your family.”

“You can come with me, you know.” Karkat says it like it’s always been an option. “Dad would love that.  _I’d_  love that. You always hang around home during holidays.”

“Yeah, well.” The _My family isn’t as close as your family_ goes unsaid because Karkat already knows. He’s known for a while.

Karkat finishes off his coffee and rinses out the mug. I give him mine, too. “We don’t have to be thinking about this right this second. I just thought it’d be nice if you had someone besides Rose to spend the holidays with. And now that she and Kanaya are married, don’t you think they’d rather spend that time together? It’s their first Christmas as a married couple, after all.”

“It’s _our_ first Christmas, too.”

He sighs. Fuck, I feel like crawling in a hole when he sighs like that. It’s like a _Goddammit, Dave, I love you, but you are the densest piece of shit sometimes._ He dries his hands and grabs me by the shoulders.

“Do you remember the night I proposed to you? Or you proposed to me… or we kind of agreed to it or whatever the fuck all that was.” My gut kind of twists at the memory, in a good way, I think. I hope. I nod. “Your phone was about to fall off the table it was ringing so goddamn much, and I didn’t know it was possible for Rose to be so excited about something, and she invited both of us to the wedding.”

“Yeah.”

“ _Both_ of us, Dave.”

“Yeah, I know. I was there, too.”

Kar rolls his eyes. “I know you know, but do you understand the significance? It was like I was getting more family. I felt like I was being accepted and appreciated and… loved, I guess.” He gives me a withering look, and there it is again, the fear and guilt, and I don’t think he means to make me feel that. He’d never intentionally hurt me. But I think I absolutely deserve to feel this, because I can’t say it and it’s hurting him.

“I want you to have a family again.” His hands drop from my shoulders and settle themselves in my palms. God, he’s such a sap. God, he’s so expressive. Sometimes I wish I could be expressive. “I know you love Rose to death. So do I. But I don’t want you to feel like she’s all the family you have left.”

I raise an eyebrow and squeeze his hands. “I don’t know what this has to do with where we spend the holidays.” He chuckles.

“Yeah, okay, I guess I got a little off-track with that.”

“And sappy.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

He moves closer like he wants to kiss me, but then hesitates. I meet him halfway. Together we taste like cinnamon and cloves and dark, dark coffee.

“I think what I’m trying to say is that of course I want to spend Christmas with you,” he says. “Just… don’t feel like you’re not welcome with my family, because they’re _your_ family now, too.”

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“They love you so much.”

“I… okay.”

“ _I_ love you so much.”

“I love you, too.”

There’s a beat of silence where I think he registers what I’ve said before I do, where his hands go limp and he looks me too directly in the eyes while he waits for me to take it back, but my brain still hasn’t caught up with my mouth. He gives me time. He’s given me so much time—he can wait the half-second it takes for my mastery of the English language to come back.

“Um.”

Brilliant.

“Sorry.”

“No.”

It only gets worse.

“It kinda slipped out.”

“Dave, no.”

Karkat’s expression plummets. Goddammit, stupid fucking moron.

He drops my hands. “You didn’t mean it?”

Holy fuck, no, no, no. I scramble for something to say while trying to keep my heart out of my throat. “No! I mean, yes, I meant it, but no, I didn’t not mean it, um. I meant it. It was just.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Can I get another try?”

His eyebrows furrow something fierce. He nods. I take his hands again.

“I love you, Karkat.”

And it’s easy. The words don’t drop to the floor like depth charges, and they don’t grit out like coarse sand. They slip out and lilt into the space between us, mingling with our coffee breath. So easy. Like I’ve been saying it for years.

“Say it again, please.”

“I love you.”

His eyes are misting now. “Again.”

In quick succession: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It wasn’t _supposed_ to be easy. I was supposed to choke, supposed to panic and freeze up like a fucking coward. I was supposed to wait until I knew absolutely for sure that I meant what I said and here it just fucking _slipped out_.

“I thought—I thought—”

“Shh.”

“I thought I fucked up big time. I thought I pressured you into this. I didn't—I—”

“No, no, no, shut up right now. You listen to me. You didn’t pressure me into anything. I want this. I love you.”

“ _Fuck._ ”

He pulls me close and with surprising strength squeezes so tight I think he’ll break my ribs, hacking ugly sobs into my shoulder and leaving my shirt sopping wet, and he’s happy, I think. I hope.

I mumble that we’re gonna be late for work, and he laughs, breathless and snotty, and pulls away just enough to kiss me, and I can suddenly feel the air freeze my own tear-tracks.

The pain and warmth blooms in my chest, and I call that love.


	5. Oh, dear

It’s something like two or three days after the wake, if you could call a roomful of strangers getting misty-eyed and shitfaced over an asshole’s corpse anything like a wake. I don’t know what to do with the ashes. They’re on a table in the guest room. I don’t want them in the apartment, but I don’t know what to do with them. He didn’t leave a will. He’d probably want something stupid and fucked. Shot off into space. Mixed with finger paints and donated to a daycare. Dumped into the local water supply. You know. Funny shit. I’m laughing right now. Really, I am.

Hahahaha. Haha.

Fucking with people like he never died. Hahaha. Classic Bro.

Ha.

Rose would know what to do. She’s always had the scathing, over-the-top passive aggression thing going for her. But I don’t think passive aggression or even outright aggression would do anything. I could add water and make ash mud and make an urn. That’d be ironic. And then when I die, I could get cremated and have my ashes put in that urn, and he’d be holding me like he never did in life. That’d be fucked. That’d be sad. Maybe I’d just smash the urn on the kitchen floor and sweep up the shards and throw them away and never think about him again. Maybe I’m overthinking this.

I’ve been nursing a headache that started the morning after the wake, and I’m at the point where I don’t think it’s a hangover anymore. Hangovers don’t hurt this bad. Haven’t been to work in a while. Haven’t been out of bed in a while. Hurting people like he never died. Hahaha. Classic Bro.

Kar gets home at some point. I hear him put grocery bags on the counter, hear him start putting stuff in cabinets and in the refrigerator. I don’t get up to greet him. I’m a horrible husband.

He comes in finally and shuts the door so the light doesn’t come through, though the sun is still deep orange through the shut-not-tight-enough blinds. He sits on the bed. Feels my forehead with the back of his hand, like I have a fever or something. He smells like sweat and copy paper.

“How are you doing?”

He whispers it. I look up at him and can’t find my voice to whisper back. I shrug.

“I talked to John today. He said he hopes you’re doing all right.”

Why doesn’t he tell me himself, I think but don’t say.

He moves his hand from my forehead to my cheek, and I realize suddenly that I haven’t shaved in a few days when there’s resistance and a scritch-scritch sound with the movement, and I get this fleeting thought that maybe I should be embarrassed or ashamed at being cooped up and wallowing for days on end without shaving, showering, brushing my teeth, being disgusting in general, but it passes.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks, and I don’t know why he’d want to, but I nod anyway. I never took him for a guy to take advantage of someone in a wrecked emotional state, but here he is. Kissing me, pulling me into a sitting position against the headboard with him, kissing me even though I’m not kissing him back, and I don’t know if he thinks it’ll help or what, because it doesn’t. This isn’t some boo-boo he can kiss better. I wanna tell him that. I wanna tell him he’s an asshole for pulling me into his lap, that I don’t wanna do this right now.

And then he stops kissing me, and he mumbles something I don’t catch, and I think, what, he wants me to get naked now? Is that where this is going? And it’s a baseless and irrational accusation to think he’d do that to me, but I’m not being very rational right now, am I?

He doesn’t get me to take off my clothes. He shifts me in his lap so I’m leaning against his shoulder, and his arms wrap around me in this really strong hold, and he rubs my back and keeps murmuring things, and I can hear him now that his mouth is right next to my ear.

“You’ll be all right.”

And. Well. It’s pretty much downhill after that.

“You’ll get through this. We’ll get through this.”

Onions, man. What’s up with those?

“You can be sad if you want. It’s okay to cry.”

His work shirt’s gonna get all ruined. I try to pull away but he just holds me tighter, and I can’t remember the last time I cried this hard. I don’t think I ever cried this hard, and I can’t fucking breathe with the way sobs just keep coming out of me every time I try to inhale, and he tells me to take deep breaths, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, but I can’t even manage that. He rocks me back and forth like I’m a little kid, but nobody ever rocked me back and forth when I was a kid so I’m just assuming that this is what it woulda been like. I fight him. I try to squirm out of his arms and beat against his back, but he’s stronger than me right now and the effort just makes me dizzy. I heard somewhere you can make yourself sick if you cry to hard and you’re not careful, and I feel that, feel like I’m gonna upchuck, but I’m not sure if anything would even come _up_ on account of me not eating anything for the past few days.

I suddenly realize I’m starving and my stomach hurts, my head hurts, my chest hurts, everything fucking  _hurts_. I can’t keep doing this to myself, but I can’t stop, either. I can’t help it. I start laughing, which is fucking weird and crazy and stupid. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing fucking makes sense, and all I know is that he’s gone, and he took something of mine with him. Probably my sanity or my childhood or something.

I feel like screaming. I feel like I’m really close to screaming, but I can’t get a big enough breath to scream, so I hold it in and fight Karkat some more, tell him to leave me alone, tell him I fucking hate him with all the air I can get, but he just holds me tighter and tells me he loves me. Tells me he loves me so goddamn much. I hate him. I hate him for doing this to me, and I hate him for telling me it’s okay to cry because crying fucking sucks, and I hate that it wears me out. I hate being tired. I’m so fucking tired.

The sobs ease down to hiccups and yawns. I can’t keep it up anymore. Kar keeps rocking me, back and forth. Back and forth. Back… and forth…

“I’m sorry,” I say. My throat’s raw. I hardly hear myself.

“It’s okay.” His voice is kind of thick, but I can’t see his face. I wonder if he’s been crying, too.

“I don’t hate you.”

“I know.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yeah.”

We don’t say anything for a while after that. He disentangles himself at some point to grab a damp cloth, and when he comes back I blot at my burning eyes, and he holds me again.

Bro’s dead.

I can breathe now.

Karkat rocks me back and forth.


	6. The rain has us

In most senses of the word, everything is going… no, I don’t want to say swimmingly. Beautifully seems like exaggeration, but as the word lingers in my mind, I find myself thinking it more and more accurate. But this isn’t about dumb semantics—it’s about the easy rituals we fall back into after the world collapses and starts from scratch. The most basic framework of our days and years of sharing space doesn’t crumble, but shifts and rearranges under the weight of new activities. Like date nights. Or more frequent visits with Rose and Kanaya. Or dancing in the kitchen, or sleeping in on weekends, or having sex. Having surprisingly _great_ sex.

Expanding on that later.

Now, it’s the winding down part of a rainy, busy Sunday spent cleaning house and cooking and being general busybodies (wait fuck when did I start using terms like “busybodies” what the hell), and we do the dishes, which is a usual thing. Karkat mumbles something about the rain making him sleepy. I agree for the most part—it’s been one of those slow storms that goes on for days and leaves the grass crazy long and green by the end of it. (Not that we have to worry about mowing grass. Just, you know. Some people care about that.)

The steady pattering has crescendoed into angry drumming within the past few hours, though, and before I know it, there’s thunder and lightning, and they come one after the other almost simultaneously. What’s that thing about counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning to tell how close a storm is? Does it even matter when they happen at the same time and shake the whole fucking apartment complex? There’s a possibility that I jump and Karkat holds my hand and shooshes me. But it’s only a possibility.

“Wanna call it early?” he asks.

“Dude, it’s only seven.”

“That’s why I said _early_. Obviously. Dumbass.”

“Hey, hey, is that any way to speak to your husband, you piece of shit?”

He snorts out a laugh and shoves at my shoulder, hand lingering to drag me away from the sink. He’s sporting a grin that makes my stomach do flips.

“Woah there, hotshot—we still got a pot to clean.” That only makes him laugh harder.

“Since when are you the responsible one?”

“Are you serious? I’ve _always_ —”

Thunderclaps cut me off, and I don’t flinch, no sir, but the way the grin on Karkat’s face slips into something more pitying tells me he _thinks_ I did. His hand slides from my shoulder to my waist so he can hold me close and okay, I guess… it’s probably all right if he thinks that.

Dirty pot forgotten, he leans in to kiss my cheek, feather light, and whispers in a voice that shouldn’t be audible over the roaring wind and rain that I’m safe, it’s okay. He probably notices I’m shaking that little bit that makes it hard to hug him back, but I manage. I never noticed I was afraid of storms till he pointed it out, and now it’s too glaringly obvious at the first rumbling thunder, let alone the window-shaking blasts from this downpour. But in all the years he knew, we could never do this.

In contrast to his kisses, Karkat’s arms are solid and grounding around me, never letting me jump with each crash. His voice goes so small, but unwavering, steady and constant, and I could drown in it, drown out the noise outside.

“Let’s go to bed,” he says, but before I can nod, the room goes dark and still. There’s a beat of silence where Karkat opens his mouth to say something else, but someone down the hall beats him to it:

_“Thon of a BITCH!”_

Oh, man, that was Sollux, wasn’t it. The grown-ass man who puts a stupid amount of time into breaking N64 games or something. It’s not just the lisp that tips me off about who it is, but the fact that I think we had a somewhat friendly conversation the other day and he mentioned something about building up speed…? The sheer hilarity of his outburst is enough to make me forget that there’s a goddamn storm a-ragin’ outside and burst out in dumb laughter.

“Was that Sollux?” Karkat asks, eyebrows furrowed, looking in the direction of his apartment.

“Oh my god,” is all I can say.

“Do you think he’s okay?”

Leave it to Karkat to show all the good neighborly concern. I can’t not kiss him when he says shit like that. “He’s fine, dude. Kiss me.”

He makes a surprised noise when our lips meet, and his arms around my waist tighten that tiny bit. “You’re okay, too?”

“We should light some candles and get our romance on.”

He sighs. It wasn’t the affirmative he was asking for, but it’s enough to wipe the worry from his face.

“Come on, man, candles.”

“We don’t have any candles, you douche.”

There’s still a bit of hazy light filtering through the window, seeing how the sun hasn’t completely set yet, but the minute hum of electricity is dead and gone. The candles thing was mostly a joke, but the silence is heavy and inviting. I kiss Karkat again (Slower! With feeling!), his lips softer than usual under mine. Maybe it’s the humidity…?

“Fine. We’ll have to fumble around in the dark like virgins.”

He breathes a laugh against my mouth, like he doesn’t believe me. “If that’s what you wanna do.”

“I do, man. I really do.”

His cheeks darken, smile turning nervous. “Oh.”

“You backing out?”

“No. Just.” His lips press into a line. I snort and kiss him to coax them out of their rigid formation, make his mouth go pliant, full, and hands go fidgety when they wander up to play at my nape.

He doesn’t have to say it. When I ask for it, when I initiate, it drives him crazy.

His tongue peeks from between his lips, deceptive in its shyness. He’d devour me the instant I let him, but I don’t want it here. We part so I can say, “Bedroom,” and then he’s nodding and stumbling with me out of the kitchen, past the couch (where we get distracted for a moment or ten), and finally into the bedroom where the door only swings halfway closed. I can’t tell who drags whom down onto the bed, but soon he’s kneeling over me, and in the dying light I can see the hunger in his eyes that used to terrify me in its foreignness but now tugs at my insides, lights something urgent and carnal. He’s gorgeous. I spent so long ignoring it.

I try to pull him down to kiss but he blinks and says, “Wait,” and heaves himself up and over to the window. The rain has gone gentle and droning, but the power’s still dead. I realize when he opens the window and lets in the night air that it’s gotten really fucking hot in the apartment, and the breeze, no matter how it makes me shiver when it ghosts over sweaty limbs, is totally welcome. Karkat peels off his shirt on the way back and situates himself on top again, this time diving right in to take my mouth, pours out everything he’s got. He’s quieter than usual. Maybe he’s as reluctant as I am to break the heavy not-quite-silence that consumes the bedroom. Every wet smack of our lips seems to echo.

It’s not long before I can feel his erection pressed against my thigh. Hell, my own hips are doing their thing, dragging against his stomach, too many layers of fabric chafing the sensitive skin. He has to be a goddamn mind reader or something, because the next thing he goes for is my fly. He sits up, his ass firm on my thighs so he doesn’t lose balance as he takes his dear sweet time with the zip and button. He grinds the heel of his palm against my cock through my underwear instead of actually getting down to it, the action pulling a reluctant whine out of my throat.

There’s a pause where he looks at me, expression saying something like, _“Did I do that?”_ and it’s hilarious and endearing but also hot because yeah, he did do that. He does this to me, gets me like this, and I can do the same to him. My head positively swims in the thought. I grin and raise up on my elbows to kiss him and get him out of his head.

“What gives?”

He blinks a few times—comes back to the present. “How do you wanna do this?”

“I’ll take sexual acts that don’t involve butts or vaginas for a thousand, Alex.”

“You can’t pick the category _after_ I ask the question, shit-for-brains.”

“Whoops. You got me there, darling.” His hesitation gives me as good a chance as any to finally take my shirt off, so I do, and chuck it across the room. “I dunno, just don’t wanna deal with enemas right now. How about we just go along with it and see where things end up?”

He frowns. “How about no. I don’t want a repeat of what happened last time we did that.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“You shat blood after.”

“Yeah, but did you get a load of how hard I came?” Haha. Load. “Worth it.”

His eyes might fall right out of his head with how far back he rolls them, but his gaze turns back to my crotch. He licks his lips, and there’s something about the action that tells me exactly what’s on his mind.

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“I want you to suck me off.”

His exhale comes loud and laced with surprise. Bingo. “How’d you…?”

“You lick your lips when you want me in your mouth.”

He  chokes on a laugh to hide the nervous way his eyes dart between my face and my crotch, but I catch it anyway. “I don’t know if I should be touched that you noticed or annoyed that it’s so obvious.”

“Touched, please?” I feel up his ass to emphasize and make something like a physical pun. (Get it? Because I’m _touching_ him? And god his ass is great. I do it some more for good measure.) “It’s not that hard to notice, though. Classical conditioning and all that. Two-and-two.”

He licks his lips again, and this time I think it’s intentional with how slowly his tongue moves, with how shiny and slick he leaves them. Fuck, my cock jumps, and he has to feel it. “Do you want it or don’t you?”

“God, yes.”

Kissing again, all-consuming and dizzying in its hunger, and soon (too soon? not soon enough?) his mouth veers from mine, my neck craning to follow him as if to cry out, _“no, come back,”_ but the promise of his destination keeps me quiet as the rain. Which is to say, not too terribly quiet, but definitely not screaming and moaning like a third-rate porn star. He takes a familiar path down my body, lingering at the landmarks—the hollow of my throat, excited pulse thrumming; the spaces between my ribs, shallow valleys visible when I suck in a breath; the shivery section of my stomach that jumps in ticklish spasms as he nuzzles and kisses where my abs were more defined once-upon-a-time. God, I’ve gone so literally soft, but Karkat doesn’t seem to mind. Not at all.

“Karkat.” He reaches my underwear, starts to mouth at my erection through the fabric. “Karkat.”

“Hmm.”

“Why are you being so…” He fiddles at the waistband of my undone pants. I lift my hips enough for him to shuck them to my knees. “How come you’re being so gentle?”

He plants a kiss at the base. Looks up, right brow raised. “Do you _want_ me to be rough? Now?”

“I.” It’s raining. That’s a thing that hasn’t stopped, and the power still hasn’t come back on. (Sollux is probably going through the five stages of grief or something.) The sheets lie cool beneath us, the outside air at odds with the heat we share, but maybe it’s also fitting. Karkat’s gaze is patient (always so patient); relaxed (I remember, he used to be so high-strung); loving (and still I wonder how long he’s felt that way). Maybe it would be for the best if…

He starts rubbing circles into my skin, and I know I need to answer. “…no,” I breathe.

He smiles. (Gorgeous. Breathtaking. How?) “Then be quiet and let me love you.”

With that, his fingers hook at my underwear and pull them down—not enough to clear my thighs, but just enough to free my dick. It kind of just… flops out against my stomach—unceremonious, not exactly attractive at all from my vantage—but it might as well be chocolate cake topped in real buttercream icing with how he eyes it.

His lips wrap around the tip, and my head falls back against the pillows. A sigh escapes, mingles with the rain—just as soft, just as enveloping as his mouth. Closing my eyes for a moment, I hear that rain with greater clarity, but also the wet sounds Karkat makes as he tongues the head and takes more of me into his mouth, and the deep breathing through his nose (contrasting with my own shallow inhale, exhale, inhale, sigh—), and I think, maybe, if I focus enough, I can hear the wall clock tick away in the kitchen, battery-powered processes ignorant of the rest of the apartment’s slumber.

Focus. Focus. On the heat, on the wetness, on his still hands alone surely burning red prints into my hips. On the ticking of the clock in the kitchen and on the ticking of my heart in my chest—sweet synchronicity—and on his mouth, sugared, sloppy, slick. Salivating. Savoring. A lot of s-words, apparently.

I lift my head, at last, to look at him. He’s making an absolute mess on my cock, saliva dribbling from the corners of his mouth, cheeks hollowing when he applies that bit of suction that makes everything feel distinctly fuzzy. My legs tremble under his touch; my stomach clenches; my hands trail down to tangle in his hair and gently push, coax him to take more, and he _does_ , fuck, he _does_ , so good, so precious.

“Karkat. Hey. Fuck, Karkat.”

He looks up, mouth still around me. His eyes, drowning brown and bright (I remember when they were always tired with dark circles), lock onto mine and send my heart into a flurry of _“Jesus Christ, he’s looking at me like he loves me, can you believe it man, can you believe you’re so goddamn lucky?”_

“You look so good like that.”

His lips might have turned up in an amused smile if not for the cock in his mouth. He puffs a tiny bit of air through his nose in what’s probably a laugh. He doesn’t believe me, either.

“I mean it. You’re fuckin’… fuckin’ beautiful.” One hand frees itself from his hair to stroke his cheek. “Love when you’re slow like this. Love you.”

He blinks. Breath stutters. Nearly fuckin’ chokes and I whine when he pulls off me, but I still grin down at him. He still isn’t used to me saying that.

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you ‘what’s the matter’ me, you… you…”

“Wonderful and loving husband?” I offer.

“I was going to say ‘paragon of human depravity,’ but that works, too.”

“Aw come on, baby, what’s depraved about sayin’ I love you?”

“The fact that you say it while I’ve got your dick halfway down my throat.”

“Man, don’t act like you don’t get off to that.”

“To what, exactly?”

“You know.” I shrug. “All the romantic bull.”

“Excuse me? Bull?” I’m almost worried he’s angry at the flippant way I’d said it, but there’s a playful smirk tugging at his lips. “I think it was you who suggested candles a little while ago. Always waking me up in the mornings with kisses, you sap. And you— _you_ —you called me darling first.”

“Oh, yeah? Well—” It’s fucking comical that this is the sort of one-upmanship we’ve resorted to. Trying to catch the other being sweet. It’s disgusting, really. “—are you just gonna gloss over all your soothing hugs and loving kisses not thirty minutes ago? And then—let’s see—how about when you asked me to dance with you in the kitchen last weekend? To Elton John, no less. I’m pretty sure that takes the multi-tiered frosted confection.”

He’s grinning and laughing now, and it’s like poetry or something. “Why are we arguing about this?”

“Are we arguing? I’m just tellin’ my husband what a marshmallow he is.” I put my hand back in his hair and comb through the sweat-pointed curls. “And how much I love him and care about him and think he’s gorgeous…”

“Again, while I have your _dick_ in my _mouth_.”

“Nuance.”

His eyes roll, and I almost think he’s gonna abandon his project, but more hesitantly than before his lips part and he takes me down deep—holy shit so fucking deep—methodical, careful so as not to make himself gag, and he _swallows_ around me. The urge to hold his head down and fuck his mouth peaks like nothing before, but I chide myself—no, don’t do that; let him go at his own pace; let him torture you; let yourself fucking drown in the slowness and sensation and silence.

He chances quick looks up at me through dark eyelashes, the sight doing rapturous things, and I can feel every point where his body touches mine, can hear every sound he makes, can practically taste the rain and the sweat and the heat in the air that’s so suffocating, and I find myself holding my breath as the heat builds and coils and _fuck I can’t take it anymore I’m gonna, I’m gonna—_

A stretched-out sound squeezes out of my lungs but leaves most of my breath behind, and Karkat has to notice my whole body tensing up and shivering and preparing for release but he doesn’t fucking get off of me, and I can’t waste breath telling him no because that would ruin the auto-asphyxiation thing I have going and long story short my mind goes out like the power in dark pulses as I come down his throat.

To Karkat’s credit, he only coughs and sputters a little bit while he tries to milk me through my orgasm instead of upchucking all over the bed. Not that… not that that’s ever happened before.

Um. Anyway.

My lungs burn with relief on the exhale, then the delicious inhale, pulse ringing and pounding in my ears so I can’t hear anything for a good few seconds. Everything comes back in waves, a little bit at a time. Karkat’s final cleaning laps at my dick comes into focus first, the way the air hitting his saliva makes the whole organ cold. He pulls my underwear back up around my hips and comes into my line of sight next, this gentle smile playing with his lips, and then I hear him ask,

“How was it?”

It’s kind of a ridiculous question, but I manage to hold back a chuckle and instead crane my head up towards him in a silent request for kisses. I answer after he pecks my cheek, “Fuckin’ fantastic. Like. Goddamn.” Karkat laughs and kisses me again, this time on the lips. “I dunno how you do it. Teach me to deepthroat like that sometime, will ya?”

“Hm. Maybe. It took a lot of practice.”

When he settles beside me, I wrap around him like a koala or some shit and feel that he’s still hard as hell. I rut against him. “Well I guess I better get started, then—”

The lights come on. Not all of them, of course, but the little nightlight in the master bath flickers and swims in my peripheral, and the overhead light-and-ceiling-fan-combo whirrs to life. The electric drone fills the silence in the walls once more.

“Oh,” Karkat says. “The power’s back on.”

“No shit,” I say, turning my head away from the ceiling and squinting so I’m not blinded. “Turn ‘em back off.”

“Already on it.” And he is, actually, already up and across the room and turning the lights back on and shutting the door the rest of the way so we can’t see the lights from the kitchen, and on his way back he reaches into the bathroom and yanks the nightlight out of the outlet. There’s darkness again, but the silence isn’t coming back, and I guess I can deal with that. It was nice while it lasted.

“So are we picking up where we left off?” I ask as he returns to the bed. The mattress dips and bounces with his weight as he tries to get comfortable, but eventually he’s settled on his back.

“Sounds like a plan.” He smiles at me with lips swollen and slightly parted from sucking me off. Practically invited, I lean down to kiss them, and then his jaw, and then his neck. And then Karkat twines his fingers in my hair and makes a happy little sigh, and that small noise drowns out the hum in the walls, and the steady rain, and the whole rest of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my [Tumblr.](http://sachete.tumblr.com)


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